The New Lexicon I.
Philosophy of Music History [research group]
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WHY THE NEW LEXICON?
The title The New Lexicon names the need to reconsider the languages through which music history organises, interprets, and evaluates the past. Terms such as period, style, work, event, source, context, influence, tradition, canon, centre, periphery, modernity, originality, authenticity, progress, rupture, and musical value remain central. Yet their meanings are neither stable, self-evident, nor universally adequate.
These terms carry histories. They emerged within particular philosophies, national projects, institutions, technologies, archives, and relations of authority. They enable some distinctions and obscure others. Research attentive to colonial circulation, migration, gender, race, class, disability, ecology, oral transmission, popular media, sound technologies, and transnational exchange tests their explanatory power. Dispersed archives, collective agency, unstable works, vernacular knowledge, and digital evidence may require inherited concepts to be revised or supplemented.
A new lexicon does not mean replacing one vocabulary with another definitive system. The programme seeks neither novelty for its own sake nor the declaration that inherited concepts are obsolete. Its task is to examine what existing words permit historians to perceive, which assumptions they carry, where they produce confusion or exclusion, and where new distinctions become necessary.
Lexical work is inseparable from historical work. Naming a period, relation, community, or process differently may reorganise evidence and significance. Distinguishing survival from preservation, influence from encounter, absence from silence, reception from use, or recovery from restitution can alter the archives consulted, scales adopted, narratives constructed, and responsibilities acknowledged. Historical research may also expose phenomena for which no adequate term exists.
The programme therefore treats vocabulary as collective research. Participants will identify key terms within their practices, trace their histories and assumptions, compare their uses across contexts, and formulate alternatives where necessary. The objective is not agreement, but greater conceptual precision alongside historiographical plurality. A productive lexicon should make disagreement more intelligible, not eliminate it.
DATES
MENTORS
PROGRAMME FORMAT
RESEARCH PREMISE
WHY THE NEW LEXICON?
CENTRAL QUESTIONS
WORKING METHOD
PARTICIPANT VALUE
WHO THE PROGRAMME ADDRESSES
TOWARDS MULTIPLE PHILOSOPHIES OF MUSIC HISTORY
APPLICATION
APPLICATION FORM AND
PARTICIPATION FEES
The New Lexicon program is produced by .abeceda Institute
.abeceda [Institute for Research in Art, Critical Thought and Philosophy], a public-benefit NGO and non-profit organisation dedicated to advancing contemporary artistic practices and critical inquiry. Through its innovative programmes, .abeceda has gained international recognition as one of the leading platforms for contemporary music and artistic research in the Adriatic region and across Europe: www.abeceda.io